Dr. Dixon Spivy, prominent Chicago psychiatrist, dies at 93

Dr. Dixon Spivy, a psychiatrist who was on staff at Chicago hospitals Amita Health Saint Joseph Hospital and Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center from the 1970s through the early 2000s, regularly took on patients with difficult mental health issues.

“His patients were complicated — they all had serious psychiatric illnesses,” said Dr. James Meserow, who worked with Spivy at Saint Joseph.

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“He was one of (those physicians) who like and thrive on taking care of the very sickest patients in their field or specialty,” Meserow said. “He was a role model in that respect.”

Spivy, who trained at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, also worked in Veterans Administration hospitals around Chicago. He founded a private practice group with other psychiatrists in 1980.

Spivy, 93, died of natural causes Aug. 3 in his home in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood, where he had lived for more than 50 years, according to his son, Samuel.

Dr. Dixon Spivy in an undated photo. (Family photo)

Spivy was born in St. Louis in 1926, the son of a doctor. After attending St. Louis Country Day School, he went on to Yale University. He interrupted his studies for stateside service with the Army near the end of World War II, returning to get an undergraduate degree in economics in 1948.

He returned to St. Louis to get a law degree from Washington University School of Law and practiced law for about a year before deciding to go to medical school.

“I think he really didn’t enjoy law,” his son said. As the son of a doctor, getting a medical degree "was something he’d always thought about.”

He went back to Washington University and graduated from its School of Medicine in 1957. He continued his training at Barnes and later with a Veterans Administration health care facility that was part of Naval Station Great Lakes near North Chicago, his son said.

Spivy was most interested in the workings of the brain and was board-certified in neurology and psychiatry. “He found the deeper he got into neurology, he found himself in the realm of psychiatry,” his son said.

He built a major psychiatric practice and was affiliated with Illinois Masonic Medical Center and what was then Saint Joseph Hospital on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago.

He told his son he always strove to do whatever he could to help his patients, many of them the most seriously mentally ill, often in psychiatric wards. That could include talking, prescribing drugs or even electroshock therapy, now known as electroconvulsive therapy.

“They did all of it back then, which I find very admirable,” said Meserow, who specializes in maternal-fetal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology. “That’s the generation of people who trained people my age.”

Dr. Rhoda Pomerantz also knew Spivy from Saint Joseph. “I know his population (of patients) was very devoted to him,” she said. “He was highly respected because of the impact he had on his patients’ lives.”